


Live Years Within A Night

by half_alive



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Barry Allen Feels, Episode Fix-it, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Barry Allen, Leonard Snart Lives, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23995015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/half_alive/pseuds/half_alive
Summary: What if Len had been there when Barry went back in time to save his mom in 1x23?
Relationships: Barry Allen/Leonard Snart
Comments: 4
Kudos: 172





	Live Years Within A Night

**Author's Note:**

> So I actually wrote most of this nearly a year ago, but it sat forever unfinished in my drafts until this year's Barry Allen week where I decided to dust it off and finish it for Day 2: Time Travel. This was an idea I really loved and searched high and low to find before deciding to just write it myself. I'm a sucker for angst and I'm a sucker for like actually seeing the effects that all the terrible shit these characters go through has on them. This is an idea I might come back to and flesh out more in the future, but for now it lives as a mediocre one-shot! I hope you enjoy!

The street was dark, illuminated only by the lights that flickered to life when Len passed them and blinked out behind him in the dark. The quiet, though expected so late at night in such an upstanding neighbourhood, was unsettling.

The scene felt familiar, though he couldn't place why. Something about the street name had struck him when Sara had announced she'd be dropping him off here, and something about the small part of the city they’d passed on their way. As far as Len knew, he'd never been here before.

The houses were sizeable yet modest, all white picket fence and classic suburban architecture. It was the kind of neighbourhood he had once imagined growing up in, back when it had felt like he would never escape his roots. That was before he had learned to wear them like armor, to take the hand he’d been dealt and play the best damn game the world had ever seen.

If there was an anachronism anywhere near here, Len couldn't find it. Everything appeared to be in order, like the whole block had been plucked straight from a catalogue and photoshopped to cookie cutter perfection. It was almost unnerving how idyllic a scene it made.

Then, just as suddenly as he'd thought that, a wild light erupted down the street and the sound of people shouting filled the air. There was a blur, and a crackle of static that raised goosebumps on his skin, and then a streak of yellow lightning blew right past him.

_ Barry _ , Len thought immediately, and then blinked in confusion because that couldn't be possible. This was somewhere in their past, years before the particle accelerator had ever been brought to fruition. If there was a speedster here, it couldn't be the Flash.

Cautiously, Len placed a hand on the Cold Gun at his hip and crept down the rows of quiet houses. The streak had disappeared a few doors down — Len approached carefully, dodging the pools of light under each streetlamp until he’d come up on the porch of a house. There was nothing to distinguish it from its neighbours, nothing that gave any indication that anything was amiss, and certainly not amiss enough to be the source of the anachronism.

That was when the screaming started. The wind picked up, and Len was nearly blown back off the porch from the force of it, shaking him off his feet. When he caught himself, it was in time to see the flash of yellow disappearing onto another street. By the time he’d gathered his bearings and braced himself to open the door, the screaming had stopped. In its place was a disconcerting silence.

He was careful creeping through the entrance, his footsteps light and the Cold Gun a firm weight in his hand. Whatever was causing the disturbance, it could still be here and it was very clearly dangerous. Len was nothing if not cautious.

Despite the commotion, the inside of the house was as pristine as the outside. The walls were decorated with framed photos he couldn’t make out in the dark, an expensive rug spread out on the floor, and carefully themed décor artfully placed on every available surface. It wasn’t until he got further in that he saw the loose papers bleeding out from the living room, the plant that had been knocked over in the hall.

Raising the Cold Gun, he pressed his back to the wall and paused, then—

Stopped cold in his tracks. It took him a moment, but as soon as he registered the voices he was hearing, his heart sank into his stomach. He knew that voice. He hadn’t heard it in months, not since the last time the Legends took a holiday, but he would recognize it anywhere.

The street name, the yellow lightning, the  _ year _ . He should have known.

Swallowing hard, Len tucked the Cold Gun back into its holster. He closed his eyes, his breath falling out of him. He could feel the pulse of his heartbeat in his throat, the pit that his stomach had become.

He should leave. It would be easy to creep back out the door without them noticing, just as easy as it was to sneak up on them. He would tell the Legends that he hadn’t found anything out of place, that they must’ve been looking in the wrong place.

Len stared at the open door, out into the night. The houses around them were starting to stir after all the noise, lights flickering on in the windows.

By the time he made a decision, Nora Allen was already dead. Barry didn’t look up as Len hesitated in the doorway, and he didn’t seem to hear his footsteps as he crossed the distance between them. He jerked when Len set his hand on his shoulder, twisting from where he’d had his head pressed to his mother’s chest.

It didn’t take long for it to register that it was Len, and then he was collapsing into deeper sobs, the kind that shook your whole body. The kind that ached for hours after, that took every ounce of energy you had and left you boneless, unable to bear your own weight.

“Barry,” Len murmured, pulling him close. He wrapped both arms around him, digging his fingers into the fabric of the Flash suit to get a better grip. He was nearly toppled over by the weight of him, but he didn’t protest when Barry pressed his face into the crook of his neck, or when his gloved hands came up to keep him there.

In his comms, he could hear Sara start to applaud his good work dealing with the anachronism, but he reached up and pulled it out halfway through her telling him to come back to the ship. His chest felt heavier than it had in a long time. It was rare for him to feel this — to feel such pain watching someone he cared about suffer.

For the longest time, he had only cared about Mick and Lisa like this. And even then, these moments were few and far between. Non-existent when it came to Mick, and rarer and rarer as Lisa grew thicker and thicker skin. They were all alike in that way — it was difficult to gut someone who had few things left to lose.

It was scary how quickly that had changed.

“Scarlet,” he said after a long time had passed. He could hear the neighbours talking in the street, the sirens growing louder as the police narrowed in on the street. He pressed his fingers into Barry’s hair. “Barry. We have to go.”

Barry, who had more practice than most in doing the impossible, pulled himself together enough to let go of Len. He didn’t look at him when he did, his eyes fixed on his mother. Len watched him press a shaky hand to her chest, over her heart. Clenching it into a fist, Barry used his other to wipe the tears off his face.

Before Len could blink, the world spun, wrapped in lightning and twisting from one scene to the next. It settled on an alley somewhere far away from the white-picket-fence street they’d been on. It took him a moment to gather his bearings, but when he did he turned to find Barry already collapsed against the wall, staring at brick and concrete with a wrecked expression on his face. The cowl of his suit was still down, and he looked so much younger than Len had ever seen him.

He  _ was _ younger. This wasn’t his Barry, he realized. This was a Barry who knew him only as the villain he used to be, a Barry who was still fresh off the betrayal of his mentor, a Barry who hadn’t had his spine broken by Zoom, or his spirit crushed by DeVoe, or his skin thickened by years of seeing the worst people had to offer and having to be the best of himself in the face of it. This was just a kid who’d wanted to help people, and who had just been destroyed by the knowledge that he couldn’t save the people who mattered to him the most.

Len didn’t know how to help him.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He kept his distance, ten feet of alley between them. As soon as he’d said it, he felt like an idiot. Of course he wasn’t okay.

Barry had the decency not to say anything, though. He didn’t acknowledge that he’d spoken, his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the wall behind him. There were still tears on his cheeks, visible even from this distance, and an unfamiliar urge to wipe them away overcame Len.

He couldn’t recall ever seeing Barry cry before. He’d teared up at sappy movies before, gotten a little misty-eyed with pride when Len told him about his heroics with the Legends, but never like this. It was unsettling to see, and even more unsettling to not be able to comfort him. Not only because comforting had never been Len’s strong suit, but also because Barry would only be more distressed by someone he thought of as his enemy wiping away his tears.

“I have to go,” Barry said eventually. It was dull, monotone. He’d opened his eyes again, but they were glassy and unfocused. “I have to go back.”

“Can you run like this?”

Of course he could, he’d just sped them halfway across the city, but that wasn’t what Len was asking. Time-travel was a far cry from racing down a couple streets — Len knew that exceptionally well, even with a timeship to do most of the work for him — and it took a kind of focus he wasn’t sure Barry could manage at the moment. There was a chance he would end up somewhere, some place in time, that he hadn’t meant to be.

Barry didn’t say anything, so Len took that as a no.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll give you a lift.”

It was a testament to how out of it, how utterly devastated he was, that Barry didn’t question it. It would be nearly a year before he knew anything about the Waverider or the Legends, but he went with Len without a word.

Sara was shocked when they boarded the ship, but she took in Barry’s expression and the way Len was carrying himself and elected not to say anything. He could feel her questions burning into the back of his head as he directed Barry to a seat in the office, but he ignored it until he’d made his way close enough to speak without being overheard.

He folded his arms over his chest. “He needs a ride back to 2014,” he said.

Sara only looked at him. She pursed her lips, crossed her own arms, then glanced at the speedster sitting in the office. “Do I want to know?”

“Possibly, but you don’t  _ need _ to.”

“Len.” She shook her head, sighing. She rubbed a hand over her mouth and met his eyes. “At least tell me he didn’t fuck up the timeline.”

“He didn’t fuck up the timeline,” Len replied dutifully. Then, because she still looked doubtful, he gestured towards the display that was still up. “See? No anachronism.”

Sara let out a long breath, still looking at him. She turned her eyes back to Barry and something in how broken he looked must have gotten to her because she softened nearly immediately. She’d always had a thing for taking on strays, the more broken the better. “2014,” she said, mostly to herself. She mulled it over. “You’ll have to wipe his memory.”

When Len merely rolled his eyes, she waved a hand. “Take the jumpship,” she called out as she left the room.

Len allowed himself half a moment to snort before he went back to Barry. He was still sitting in the chair where Len had left him, elbows on his knees with a guarded expression.

“What is this?” he asked when Len approached him. “A spaceship?”

“Timeship,” Len corrected automatically. Then, leaning against the table to face him, “Don’t think too hard, kid. You have bigger things to focus on. Let’s just get you back home.”

It took surprisingly no convincing for him to agree, and soon enough they were both on board the jumpship on their way back to Barry’s time. It was silent between them for a long time, during which Len kept surreptitiously checking on him out of the corner of his eye. Barry seemed lost in thought, staring out at the swirling vortex of time.

Len had never felt more lost. There was something he was supposed to be saying, something he should be doing, but he had no idea what that was. The closest Len had come to this was when his own mother died, and even then he’d barely been old enough to notice it had happened. He could call on that fear that had been with him for months now, the one that came every time he thought about what his boyfriend did for a living, but even that seemed miles away from watching his mom bleed out in his arms, knowing it was in his power to save her but also knowing that he couldn’t without risking everything and everyone.

“You seem different.”

Len startled, though he’d had years of practice in not showing it. He glanced at Barry, who he found was looking straight at him, an unreadable expression on his face. He turned back to the console of the ship. “I am different.”

“Are you…” Barry trailed off. “You’re from another time?”

“What gave it away? The  _ time _ ship or the fact I didn’t shoot you on sight?”

“Both,” Barry said, completely serious. “But mostly the way you keep looking at me.”

Len purposely  _ didn’t _ look at him. He kept his eyes on the screen that charted their way through time and kept his face carefully neutral. “How’s that?”

“Like you care. Like you actually want to help.”

He did look at him now, meeting his eyes for a long minute as he debated how to respond. He still couldn’t get a read on Barry — it set him on edge, as it always did. Barry was an open book so much of the time that Len sometimes forgot how good he was at closing himself off.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said finally, because this Barry would probably never believe that it was so much more than that. That Captain Cold didn’t just care about The Flash, he loved him. Even if he hadn’t told him. “I just don’t want you to fuck with time. It’ll be a pain in my ass to fix it.”

As soon as he said it, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. Beside him, Barry turned to look back out the window. “Don’t worry,” he said bitterly. “If I was going to, I would have.”

“I know.” Len shifted. “I’m sorry. About your mom. I’m sure it doesn’t help to hear this, but you did the right thing.”

Barry’s voice was soft and tired. “Sometimes the right thing fucking sucks.”

.

It had been a while since he’d come home. Nevertheless, the apartment was nearly just as he’d left it. There was a dirty pot in the sink and the shoes by the door were out of line, but otherwise it looked just as it had a few months ago.

Len neatened the shoes by the door and lined his own up beside them, hanging his coat on the rack. The light that streamed through the window was misty, off-coloured by the setting sun. Barry would either be patrolling the city in a red suit or watching Mr. Robot in the den. The quiet told him it was the former.

He ran a hand down his face, taking the breath he hadn’t been able to on the jumpship, and then moved into the kitchen to wash the pot. It wasn’t until he was setting it on the drying rack that his eyes caught on the photograph tucked into the corner.

He’d seen it before, of course. It had been there since long before he’d moved in, with that old wooden frame that always looked like it was about to fall over. He’d pointed out a new one when they’d gone shopping once, but Barry had just given him a tight smile and a shake of his head and he’d left it alone.

It was jarring. The difference between Nora’s smiling face in the photo and the sight of her bleeding out in that very same living room. Even Barry — a happy child here contrasted with the sobbing man hunched over his mother’s limp frame — seemed unnatural after where he’d just been.

Barry, his Barry, never talked about it. At least not to Len. He talked about his childhood, sure. About the kids at school and how his parents always made dinner together. He even talked about Eobard, about how much pain he’d caused them all. But he never talked about that night, or about any of the nights that followed where he must have been so afraid, so alone, both in 2000 and in 2014, when he’d had to relive it all over again.

In a way, Len felt like he’d violated some kind of privacy Barry should’ve had. Like he knew something he wasn’t meant to be privy too.

It was this feeling that had him cautiously running his hands down the sides of his legs when the apartment door swung open. He watched Barry toss his keys in the bowl, shrug off his jacket, then pause when he went to kick off his shoes and noticed the extra pair.

“Len,” he greeted happily, blinking in surprise. He smiled. “When did you get home?”

Len shook off the discomfit so he could meet Barry halfway for a kiss. “Just now.”

Rubbing his arms affectionately as he took Len in, Barry shook his head. He kissed him again, then pulled away to finish taking off his shoes. “How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know.” He paused, taking in the sight of him. He looked so different than the Barry he’d just seen. His Barry was older, deeper lines around his mouth and broader shoulders, his hair styled just differently enough for Len to notice. It was the way he carried himself that struck Len the most, though. Lighter and heavier all at once, like he wasn’t weighed down by grief anymore but experience had cost him the naiveté that was once his most defining trait. It was hard to find that broken boy inside him now, to look at him and see the man so desperate to stop the pain that he’d tried to do the impossible, the man so broken when he’d realized that he couldn’t.

Len wondered who had been there then. Iris? Joe? Caitlin and Cisco? Anyone? Or had he held it all within himself, hurting for no one else to see, shouldering a burden too heavy to bear?

“I love you,” Len said earnestly when Barry had turned back to face him. He swallowed around the lump in his throat that came up every time he’d ever thought about saying those words. “You know that, right?”

“I know,” Barry said easily, resting a hand on his cheek. “I love you, too.”

Len smiled. Not the full, happy kind that Barry did, but the small, loving kind he reserved only for the important moments. He pulled Barry close, holding him tight, and tried to give him all the comfort he couldn’t give his younger self.

He was certain Barry didn’t need it now, but it was the best he could manage.

**Author's Note:**

> I adore all comments and kudos, and please feel free to come check me out/yell at me on [Tumblr](https://frozenflash.tumblr.com) <3 Also feel free to make suggestions/requests over there, I absolutely love prompts xx


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